PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

Familiarity
i) Word frequency and word familiarity.
Word frequency and word familiarity (Wilson, 1988) for the 405 verbal
labels of the object pairs were comparable between the negative, neutral and
positive groups of stimuli. The average ratings (standard deviation in
parentheses) for negative, neutral and positive stimuli were for verbal word
frequency 68.24 (151.53), 67.73 (195.21) and 63.86 (75.97) and for word
familiarity 394.34 (243.83), 430.95 (227.43) and 469.64 (224.37) respectively.
ii) Familiarity of object.
There were 405 photographs of objects (1 item from each pair) rated for
familiarity on a scale of 1 (highly unfamiliar) to 10 (highly familiar) by one
University of Nottingham student. Mean average item ratings (with standard
deviations in parentheses) were comparable for negative, neutral and positive
objects and were 4.41 (2.43), 4.48 (3.74) and 3.94 (3.76) respectively.
Procedure
Study.
Participants were presented with 228 nameable, colour photographs of
objects (76 negative, 76 neutral, 76 positive). Items were presented for 500 ms
with a variable inter-stimulus interval of between 6 and 14 seconds, which was
randomly determined for each item. Participants were presented with a
photograph, then had to make a task decision during the inter-stimulus interval
whilst a central fixation cross was displayed. In this task participants had to
indicate by key press (1 = Yes, 0 = No) whether in the real world the object
would fit inside a shoebox, which was placed next to participants throughout
the experiment. This was the task used by Kensinger et al. (2006) and ensured
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